Farewell to ARCCSS

On Wednesday, June 27, we celebrated the achievements of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science with a legacy event at Old Parliament House. The celebrations also included three masterclasses in various aspects of climate science.

Special guests for the celebrations included Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel, the CEO of the Australian Research Council Prof Sue Thomas and our host the CEO of Science and Technology Australia, Kylie Walker.

Along with our stakeholders, we looked back at the achievements of the past seven years, which were wonderfully wrapped up in a 16-page legacy report (pdf).

The room was filled with warm chatter from a large crowd of ARCCSS alumni, current staff and guests.

Booths were dotted around the room from each research program and also from our stakeholders. NCI and our own Martin Jucker produced some impressive virtual reality experiences for the night. You can see some more of Martin’s work here.

James Goldie produced a range of animations and interactive visualisations for CLEX booths. He has kindly described how he put these together in this article in our newsletter.

We also produced three videos summarising the research ARCCSS has produced over the past ten years.

As well as the videos, we were treated to some generous speeches by our guests, who clearly recognized the value of what has been accomplished both in our specific research and more broadly for the entire climate science community in Australia.

When Director Christian Jakob had his turn at the podium he acknowledged the work that former Director Andy Pitman had done to get ARCCSS running.

He also acknowledged the work of Elaine Fernandes, who was the driving force and primary organizer of the entire legacy event.

It is to her credit that the event was a remarkable success.

In all, the legacy event was a fitting conclusion to a Centre that has had such a far-reaching impact on climate science here and overseas.